Dear friends in Christ at Peace and Grue,
“Jesus came and said to them, ‘All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing then in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you. And behold, I am with you always, to the close of the age.’” (Matthew 28:18-20)
Christians have received an awesome privilege: By following Christ we become God’s partners in seeking the realization of God’s loving purpose for the world. Biblical writers explain this privilege in different ways, but the key point is that the church has a critical role in helping all people respond to the good news of God’s mighty deeds for the world as the One who creates it, redeems it, and brings it to its final fulfillment.
The church’s record of handling this privilege is spotty. On some fronts we and our forebears have done better, on others worse. In modern times with the rise of secularism, the church has been better at gathering people, proclaiming Christ in their midst, caring for them, and talking about faith than it has been at setting people free for the ordinary activities of life in which God finds us, and we can find God at work.
Christian theology, especially Lutheran theology, has an answer to our broken, compartmentalized lives. God made our faith personal through the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus, and God made our faith communal so that we nurture one another in this faith. We have something to offer those who are yearning for wholeness. When people discover Christ’s presence in their daily lives, when they make connections between their faith and their unique strengths, when they experience a deep sense of belonging and are confident that they will make a difference in the world, they will discover, as Frederick Buechner wrote, “the place where your deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet.”
The Christian church is not an end in itself; it is God’s mission for the world. When the church focus on the internal work of the congregation rather than its people, the church competes for members’ time, energy, and money. When the church equips its people to do the work of God, to take their ethics into the world, and to pour out their lives of faith in those places where they spend most of their waking hours, working for good pay, inadequate pay, or no pay; wearing white collars, blue collars, or no colors; enjoying it, hating it, or tolerating it, the power of God’s people will be unleashed and the Christian church will flourish through God’s activity in the lives of his people. This work is neither evangelism nor social action in the contemporary sense of those terms, but it will help make a congregation attractive to those who yearn to bring their lives to God, and it will help every disciple of Jesus be of earthly good.
A life centered in Jesus Christ gives identity and a place to stand in a chaotic and compartmentalized world. It’s wisdom is “ec-centric,” centered outside itself in Christ for the world, and “ec-static,” alive to the Spirit’s agency in and through it. We believe that God’s Holy Spirit is stirring the church for service in the world that God so loves. We believe the people of the church are God’s gifts called to serve in Jesus’ name. We believe “we are ambassadors for Christ, since God is making his appeal through us” (2 Corinthians 5:20), as we live out our Easter faith.
Pastor Dan